Goodbye Flash: YouTube mobile goes HTML5 on iPhone and Android

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Google has re-written the mobile YouTube site entirely in HTML5, allowing smartphone owners to browse and search the videos, access the features of their account and yes – stream video without the Adobe Flash plugin. There’s no doubt that the owners of iPhone or iPod touch will like the new site that launched Wednesday morning at m.youtube.com, but it’ll also appeal to the folks on other mobile platforms like Android.

The user interface has been completely overhauled and optimized for touch-based input. You can now access the features of your YouTube account like favorites, playlists, video search, subscriptions, and uploaded videos. The video page packs in all the key elements of desktop YouTube, including comments and related videos. You can favorite, like, or dislike the video, post comments, create playlists, search with suggestions, and watch the video in high-quality. The interface feels a lot snappier on my iPhone 3G compared to the old site.

YouTube mobile debuted in 2007 with a mere thousand videos. The search firm says inadequate mobile browsers and sub-par hardware prevented the mobile site from keeping up with desktop YouTube. Today, the mobile site is serving over a hundred million videos a day. Google also said that iPad users can now browse the full YouTube site and watch the videos by enabling a HTML5 video player on this page.

Christian’s Opinion

This move by Google is yet another indication that the days of Flash video on the web’s largest video repository are numbered. YouTube began experimenting with a HTML5 video player early this year. Of course, the new HTML5 mobile site doesn’t mean that Google is ready to part ways with Flash yet. When Apple introduced the original iPhone in July 2007, Google began resizing YouTube videos to the iPhone’s 320×480 pixel resolution and re-encoding them using the H.264 codec.

As you know, Apple’s mobile devices don’t support Adobe Flash so iPhone owners could only stream YouTube videos via the YouTube app that’s part of the system software. Granted, iPhone owners were able to browse the old YouTube mobile site but they couldn’t watch videos on it. Now, when you tap a video on the new mobile site, the system media player takes over and streams H.264 video over the network. Tap Done and you’re instantly back in the mobile site. And because iOS supports HTTP streaming, video quality dynamically adjusts to network conditions. Another biggie: Google can update the web app anytime they want, “unlike native apps which are not updated as frequently,” as they’ve put it.